Robert Fulghum Quotes

I'm very passionate about philosophy and religion.

Philosophy is an attempt by man to find cause and effect. Religion has the same goal.

Western Humanism does not ask the fundamental questions about the meaning and limits of personal experience. Humsniists leave aside the mysteries of contingency and transitoriness, for the certainties of research, production, consumption.

Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, which stands continually open to our gaze. But the book cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend the language and read the letters in which it is composed.

Aside from theology and sex there is really nothing to talk about.

Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom.

In God alone, essence (what He is) and existence (that he is) coincide.

My purpose is to explain, not the meaning of words, but the nature of things.

Philosophy was once considered science.

I was interested in philosophy before I knew I was. That's to say, when I was at school, I used to argue with my friends about issues that turned out to be philosophical ones of some kind.

The two basic topics which fascinate me are 'What is reality?' and 'What constitutes the authentic human being?'

The greatest mystery of existence is existence itself.

I didn't study English literature - I studied philosophy at university - so Kierkegaard, Nietzsche - these people are among the most important writers to me. So my interest is in the big questions more than it is in storytelling.

That's something I learned as a philosophy major: The philosophy ethos is, always question, never rest.

Philosophy teaches you to think big.

I'm very interested in theories in how we exist: how people exist and how souls exist separate from their bodies or their brains.

There is no philosophy that is not to some extent also theology.

Philosophy! the lumber of the schools.

In my writing I even question the universe; I wonder out loud if it is real, and I wonder out loud if all of us are real.

And nothing is, but what is not.

I'm not a philosopher.

God is the place of spirits, as spaces are the places of bodies.

I stick my finger into existence.. it smells of nothing. Where am I? Who am I? What is this thing called the world? What does this word mean?

I'm apt to get drunk on words...Ontology: the word about the essence of things; the word about being.

In the case of Anathem, most of the research had to do with philosophy and metaphysics. Reading this sort of thing has never been my strong suit, so I actually had to be somewhat more "organized and results-driven" than is my habit. I just made up my mind that I was going to have to read some of these philosophy tomes, and I forced myself to read something like 10 pages a day until I had bashed my way through them.